Keith's Day-Trading Strategies

I'm Keith Fitschen. Until recently, I’ve avoiding commodity futures day-trading systems because of transaction costs. The slippage and commission incurred on day-trades ate up the profits you could make. And in the past, the only real viable candidate to day-trade was the S&P mini because its’ tremendous liquidity limited slippage to less than a point, even in pit trades. Two trading evolutions have changed the impact of transaction costs: the electronic markets, and discount brokers. The electronic markets have eliminated the need to cross your fingers and hope for the best when placing a market order. The bid/ask spread on most commodities is a couple of ticks, in some, only one. And competition from discount brokers, like Interactive Brokers, has forced even retail brokers to dramatically lower their commission rate. These two evolutions now make day-trading viable, and on most liquid commodities, not just the emini S&P. I’ve developed a family of commodity futures day-trading strategies that use the same market principal to try and capture profits on short-term trades. Using a number of time-frames, these strategies try to anticipate, early in the trading day, the trend for the day. Once determined, entry is made in the direction of the anticipated trend and money management is used to try and stay with the trade through the day.

The performance reported in this writeup is hypothetical. It is based on the use of computerized system logic on Tradestation continuous contract data. There is no slippage or commission deduction from each trade. Please note the following Commodity Futures Trading Commission disclaimer on hypothetical trades:

PROFITABILITY BY COMMODITY

The following tables show the performance when trading one contract at each signal. Note the start date. That date is the earliest date Tradestation has continuous electronic contract data for the commodity, or five years of data.

The performance of these strategies is staggering. Most of these commodities make over $30,000 a year! And the drawdowns experienced to achieve those returns is relatively low.

Sample Equity Curves

The statistics in the table above are highly informative, but an equity curve shows the strengths and weaknesses of a strategy at a glance. Here are four equity curves that highlight the consistency of these commodity futures trading strategies:

Keith's Fitschen's Day-Trading Equity Curve: Mini S&P

Keith's Fitschen's Day-Trading Equity Curve: Heating Oil

Keith's Fitschen's Day-Trading Equity Curve: Copper

Keith's Fitschen's Day-Trading Equity Curve: DAX Index

Price

These strategies are not available for purchase, the signals can only be leased. In order to trade the strategies, you must have an account with one of our preferred brokers and authorize the broker to trade one, or more, of these strategies for your account. The cost to lease the signals is $200 per month per contract.